


there was a time

by uglyguccislippers (Hyb)



Series: work song (crawl home) [1]
Category: EXO (Band), SHINee
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ballet Dancer Kim Jongin | Kai, M/M, Spy Lee Taemin, a serious spy story in the sense that candy corn is a vegetable, not plot-intensive, they are literally too soft to function
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-13 21:05:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14120808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyb/pseuds/uglyguccislippers
Summary: Taemin is sitting in his kitchen, peeling an apple. His hair is blond. He cocks his head at Jongin as if remembering something. As if he were only holding a thought, waiting for Jongin to return. “I wouldn’t break into your place if it wasn’t important,” he offers smoothly.





	there was a time

**Author's Note:**

> Hey friends, here's a hot mess no one asked for.

 

Something is casting a glimmer up on the ceiling of the studio, shivering like a star. Jongin noticed it as he was turning out the lights, as Sehun was hollering his goodbyes down the corridor and locking the door behind him. There’s no one to drag him from his wandering thoughts as he slumps back against the barre and tilts his head up to stare. Sense-memory dances at the corner of his sight, sweet and elusive, and he doesn’t know why he wants so urgently to remember until he does.

The crackle of fire, driftwood popping. The hush of waves. The shine of Taemin’s wet mouth grinning around a bottle of beer, his laughing eyes dark and hidden. Jongin curses, succinctly and with feeling. The urge to muscle in a late practice with only the shadows for company fades, sudden exhaustion settling over his shoulders.

On the train home, Jongin nearly starts at a reflection in the glass. But it’s only himself, tired and alone.

 

 

 

At home, there’s an unfinished book beside his bed with a creased napkin holding his place. On the napkin is a phone number. It was given to him by a man with beautiful hands and a conspiratorial grin. But that was weeks ago, and he's probably long since stopped waiting for Jongin to call. Moved on. There’s no shortage of company in the city, Jongin has found. He balls the napkin into the trash and cranks the hot water in the shower until the pipes groan.

When he steps out of the shower, a tendril of chill air cuts through the steam and Jongin smells smoke. He hurriedly wraps a towel around his waist, cautious of the windows and neighbors.

Taemin is sitting on his kitchen counter.

Taemin is sitting in his kitchen, peeling an apple. His hair is blond. He cocks his head at Jongin as if remembering something. As if he were only holding a thought, waiting for Jongin to return. “I wouldn’t break into your place if it wasn’t important,” he offers smoothly. The peel of the apple is unwinding in an unbroken spiral from the flash of the knife. The window over the sink is cracked, a cigarette butt smoldering in one of his saucers on the sill, and Taemin is sitting in his kitchen.

The blood has drained down to the soles of his feet, his stomach plummeting. Jongin watches the knife, mouth dry, and Taemin has the good grace to toss it in the sink with the apple skin. He takes a kittenish bite, tongue darting out to chase the juice from his lip, and watches Jongin fight for air.

“How do you know where I live?” Jongin forces out, words grinding like stones, one question when a hundred answers wouldn’t make sense of the inconceivable here and now. There’s a baseball bat under the futon, and he wonders if he’s going to need it, hysteria ringing in his ears.

Taemin looks insulted. “Like you were hard to find. You still use your mom’s birthday in all your passwords, genius. Besides, you think it’s tough tracking down Korean guys in New York who happen to be a Big Deal in ballet?”

“Why?” His tongue is thick in his mouth. There’s a ghost in his kitchen. He ought to be afraid, but the traitorous heat curling low in his belly insists that his memories haven’t done Taemin justice. Lean as a cat with a heart-shaped face, he has to be insane but he’s still the best thing Jongin has ever seen.

Pretty Taemin who is biting his cheek, studying Jongin in lieu of an answer. Shameless, eyes drifting down and up again. “You look good,” he says, and it’s far from sweet. “Maybe I was thinking about you.”

And it’s such bullshit but Jongin can’t remember what he was going to say, hitching a step forward. “You’re bleeding,” he says, numb. He mistook it for a shadow but no, there’s blood at Taemin’s hairline, dark against his bone white hair. “Why are you bleeding in my apartment?”

 

 

 

When he remembers Taemin. Often and against his will. Jongin remembers the bar on the beach with the chipped disco ball, the smell of torches. He remembers how the coconut and rum went to his head, how the flavor seemed to coat his tongue for days.

As often as he remembers Taemin kissing a bruise into his hip, or singing under his breath when he thought Jongin was asleep, he remembers a pretty stranger sidling up to the stool beside him and stealing his drink from under his nose. Glamorous, with a delicate silver chain at his throat and a billowing linen shirt only half buttoned. He remembers how he beamed like starlight when he asked Jongin if he was Korean. How his eyes drifted languidly to the dance floor and back, and Jongin had never known instant kinship like that, the understanding that passed unspoken between them. _What if I asked you to dance? What if you said yes?_ The words were on his tongue, reckless. Far from home, no looking over his shoulder. But under the bar a thumb traced his bare knee and Jongin knew he wanted so much more than a dance.

 

 

 

“Are you going to kiss it better?” Taemin asks, and he sounds so delighted at the prospect that it ought to be criminal.

“I should call the cops, what is wrong with you,” Jongin snaps, but he never says _get out_ , his lungs tighten and betray him at the thought. He fists the towel at his waist. Taemin’s lashes flicker when he looks, and of course it would be like this, Jongin’s skin hot and tight under his stare, unable to muster a defense.

“Jongin-ah,” Taemin wheedles, dragging out the vowels like taffy, like Jongin is being _unreasonable_ and Jongin - he’s never even thrown a punch in his life but a mug shatters over Taemin’s head, day old coffee dripping down the cabinets, and that was Jongin, he _threw_ that, that was him. Shit. Worst of all, Taemin didn’t even flinch. He’s still watching him like a cat, unblinking.

“Pretty sure I have a concussion already,” Taemin says mildly. Takes a bite of the apple and keeps talking with his mouth full, muffled. “Think you could get your licks in tomorrow?” Something thunderous must move over Jongin’s face again because he sobers, puts the damn apple down and sinks to his feet. “Jongin. I’m in trouble, and so are you. So why don’t you get dressed and let me tell you why.”

 

 

 

Taemin said he worked in cybersecurity. Three years ago, Taemin said he was in Hawaii for a conference - one he never seemed to attend. Taemin was a fucking liar.

And Jongin all the more the fool. He could still call the police, his phone accuses him from the nightstand. The apartment is a shoebox, Taemin would hear him, but surely he would just run and that would be enough. Instead he shrugs on his sweats and an overlarge sweater. He lets Taemin pour him a cup of coffee from his own damn kitchen and stares at his small, hard hands. His knuckles are split, still raw and angry.

“What did you do?” Jongin sinks into his futon, wraps his fingers around the mug, and feels nothing. Taemin empties the ice tray into a dish towel and presses the bundle to his ribs with a sigh.

“Stop looking at me like I just robbed the corner store,” Taemin rolls his eyes, as if put out. “Give me some credit. Or don’t,” he adds quickly when Jongin scowls. “Look. This is real, this is happening. I’m with the good guys, or close enough. I don’t - what do you want me to say? I steal secrets and I'm good at it.” For the first time he looks haggard, his eyes pinched with exhaustion.

“So you’re a spy,” Jongin nods. “Great. What does this have to do with me?” Taemin’s mouth flattens as if he suspects pandering, but he eases back into the single chair clutching his ice. Jongin is closer to the door, the coffee table is between them, he could bolt. If he were so inclined.

“Things just went - sideways. People you don’t even want to imagine, they have my name, my face, do you know what that means?” He doesn’t move, but Taemin must be satisfied with what he reads in his expression. And then he - Jongin swears he hesitates, for a moment, toes flexing in his socks like he’s actually nervous. “Anyone tied to me - anyone involved. Something could happen to you. And I think you’d agree we were pretty _involved_.”

Jongin scoffs, sharp and involuntary. “So now you care what happens to me?” In the strained quiet he can hear the radiator kick on, hear Taemin’s controlled exhale. Closes his eyes when the mug is eased from his grasp because this, here and now, is the first time they’ve touched. His proof that Taemin is real, and warm, not a ghost sent to mock him. Looking and touching all at once would be too much, and so he doesn’t dare open his eyes when Taemin sinks a knee to one side of his thighs, then the other, but doesn’t give Jongin his weight. He’s poised like he could fly away. Cold hands lace behind his neck and Jongin is furious, intoxicated, so dizzy his head rolls into Taemin’s chest.

“You’re insane. I’m insane for listening to you,” he hears himself, muffled against a leather jacket. He can smell Taemin’s cigarettes, here, and the bite of sweat beneath. A hand strokes his hair. Taemin hums once, neutral, and denies nothing.

 

 

 

They talk until dawn. Until the fires on the beach burn down to embers. The sunburned families drift back up the shore, laughing couples sway onward with arms linked. They sit in the sand until the beer is gone, until he’s too sober to pretend he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Jongin has never told a stranger so much about himself and yet it pours out of him like water. What else? What did Taemin say? It’s elusive, it slips away. Surely no earth shattering revelations, no reason for Jongin to feel like he was being gifted an answer to a question he never knew to ask, that everything was illuminated.

They talk until their voices are hoarse, but they’re quiet as the elevator purrs up the floors of the hotel. They stare at their reflections, suddenly shy, trying to catch each other looking. Jongin wears a crooked, idiot grin he can’t seem to shake. They don’t leave the room for two days.

Back in Seoul, Jongin has folded and sealed the contents of his life into a pitiful stack of boxes. In New York, an empty apartment is waiting for him. In the pictures, the sunlight seemed to soak into the unmarred white walls and glow. Taemin must have an inkling that this is no ordinary vacation, he must guess. The honeymoon suite is all too obvious.

He doesn’t ask. Instead he nudges Jongin back against the door, sweet and unhurried. When Jongin kisses him he sighs into his mouth and sways into him, thumbs skimming beneath his shirt to stroke his hips. It’s been years since he kissed a man but he doesn’t remember it going straight to his head like this, effervescent as champagne.

“How did you-” Jongin must be crazy, trying to talk through this, when Taemin’s mouth is so warm, his eyes heavy and dark. “You just - knew.” How did you know I would want you, he struggles to say. How did you know we were the same.

Taemin looks surprised, then pleased. His hands slide into Jongin’s back pockets like they belong there. “I took a chance,” he smiles. Tilts to press his lips to the hinge of Jongin’s jaw. To the hot beat of his pulse, the notch of his clavicle. “You were drinking alone, on the beach, with no ring. Maybe I just wanted to be right.” He kicks off his sandals and eases onto his toes to kiss Jongin again. A flash of teeth, a flicker of tongue, daring Jongin to chase him.

“Can you stay?” Jongin curls a hand into the hollow of his back, tugging him an inch closer. “You must have somewhere to be.”

Taemin leans in until the tips of their noses brush, and confides, with such naked earnestness that Jongin forgets to breathe - “I am _exactly_ where I want to be.”

 

 

 

“I shouldn’t be here,” Taemin says at last, after an eternity of Jongin breathing him in. He eases himself to Jongin’s side, stretches his legs out over Jongin’s lap, and Jongin lets him. Curls one hand over his ankle and kneads with his thumb, and hates how he thrills at the barely audible _ah_ caught behind Taemin’s teeth. “But you’re not an asset. I can’t pull any favors to keep you safe. You don’t have to like it, but I’m here.”

“Do I need to be - packing a bag, or something?” Choosing to believe Taemin, it’s so far outside the realm of possibility. And yet. Jongin finds himself trying to follow the facts, such as they are, to their logical conclusion. If Taemin is surprised at his acquiescence, he covers well. Squeezes Jongin’s elbow like an apology. Not that Taemin has apologized to him, not once, says the ache between his lungs.

“No offense, but I don’t think you’d be able to pull it off. Running.” Unspoken, maybe, that Taemin can run. That he ran so well Jongin was left in his dust, wounded. “Maybe I’m wrong, and nothing gets traced back to you. The best thing you can do is act normal. Do what you always do. I’ll be with you.”

“For how long?” Jongin waits, even lifts his hand away to prepare for the worst - for whatever Taemin will say to taint once and for all the memories he’s hoarded like shells these three years. When he finally steels himself to look, Taemin is _asleep_. Worse, Jongin is tender as a bruise just watching him. “Taemin.” He doesn’t stir. And Jongin lets him doze until his legs are prickling with pins and needles.

When he touches the blood at his hairline and probes a lump beneath, Taemin hitches upright, eyes snapping open. The weave of the cushion is imprinted in his cheek. “You smell,” Jongin says flatly. “Take a shower, why don’t you?”

And somehow he follows. Helps Taemin out of his shirt when he winces over his ribs. His side is mottled purple, his shoulder and bicep scabbed over with a long swipe of road rash. To the nudity itself he feels - immune. Like an extension of his own body. Or maybe, a hot and mortified flush reminds him, you can’t pretend to care about modesty when it comes to the first person who ever put their tongue in your ass. Through the translucent curtain he watches Taemin ease his head back under the water and hiss, shoulders snapping tight.

“You don’t want to come in here?” he calls from beneath the spray. Jongin has never heard him sound so - unsure. Didn’t think he was even capable of it. He stretches out one arm to jerk the curtain back a foot and glare up at him.

“Is this fun for you? Is this what you do? Come back around when somebody might have a chance to stop _thinking_ about you, just to make them want you again?”

Taemin winces at his tone and stuffs his hands under his armpits to cover his chest, as if his cock isn’t nestled between his thighs at Jongin’s eye level. His hair is slicked back from his brow, exposing every lovely bone in his face, and he looks untouchable as a statue. “Do you really think I didn’t miss you?” he asks, so quietly it sounds like pity, nearly drowned out by the rush of water. “What would you have liked me to say, Jongin? ‘Sorry, I only needed to lie low for a couple of days and now that it’s been a _week_ people are asking questions?’” He unclenches his rigid arms and works a lather slowly from his neck down to his raw shoulder, mouth tightening to a hard white line. “‘Sorry, people like me don’t get to hold on to people like you?’”

“Well,” Jongin says when he remembers how to breathe. _Did you want to hold on to me?_ “It would be a start.” They don’t speak again, not until Taemin is swaying out of the tub on unsteady legs.

“Hold still,” he says, ruffling a towel over Taemin’s hair like he’s made of glass, fearful of his wound. So close, he can’t look Taemin in the eye, but he can feel the heat from the shower on his skin, his warm breath on Jongin’s throat. Jongin sighs, like a curse, and drops a kiss to his forehead.

 

 

 

They tangle on the lavish bed, clumsy with want. Jongin has a thigh nudged between Taemin’s but there’s no urgency, no matter the sparks of promise when their hips rock together. He’s drunk on Taemin’s sighs under him, his kiss-swollen mouth.

“I don’t want tonight to be over yet,” he admits when Taemin mumbles something half-hearted about sleep. Then Taemin teases him because it’s already day and Jongin yanks his shirt up to nip his stomach, delighted when he’s _ticklish_ , all that poise evaporating in an instant as he yelps and convulses.

Sleep comes when his limbs feel honeyed and heavy, when he can’t keep his eyes open as Taemin quietly recounts some story about a customs debacle at a Thai airport, ribs quaking at his own exaggerated impressions. The room is too warm, one of them should crack the door to the balcony, but Taemin tugs Jongin’s drooping head down to his chest and strokes his hair until the distant waves carry him away.

They kiss, they explore with awestruck hands, meandering toward their unspoken destination until late afternoon. The curtains are parted down a stripe of hot gold sunlight, the searing blue of sea and sky, when Taemin molds himself against Jongin’s chest, his thighs, and sinks down onto him slowly. He kisses Jongin’s nose, his eyelids, then hitches the sweetest sigh when his hips snap helplessly upward.

For two days they eat room service on the floor, legs tangled, instead of at the table. Jongin likes pancakes soaked in butter but he likes licking syrup from the hollow of Taemin’s throat even more. Taemin follows him into the shower and kisses his neck, kneads his shoulders, twists his fingers up into Jongin until his knees buckle and he has to clutch the wall. He wears Jongin’s shirt, his clean underwear, and something goes molten in Jongin’s stomach at the sight. He claps, delighted, when Jongin demonstrates first through fifth position in his bare feet, toes flexing against the carpet, a few playful hops between for show. He makes Jongin hold a pose and traces the muscles of his quadriceps in sharp relief, following with his mouth, until Jongin is so flushed that he takes pity and drags him down to the floor.

On the third day Jongin wakes to pale dawn creeping along the floor toward the bed. He tilts his head into the breeze from the open door and watches Taemin lean on the balcony, arms stretched out before him with a cigarette burning. Already it’s difficult to imagine him being so still, features smooth and distant, indecipherable. But when he glances back over his shoulder and meets Jongin’s eyes his smile is brilliant, contagious.

Taemin has to slip back to his own hotel and Jongin kisses him so long at the door that his lips are buzzing when they part. He grins like a lunatic when he comes back to find his coffee has gone cold.

Whatever he expects - maybe rolling Taemin beneath him this time, holding him face to face and feeling every movement in his punched out breaths - he doesn’t expect Taemin to sweep back like a whirlwind with brochures in hand. He rubs Jongin down in sunscreen like his mother (save for the teasing, appreciative squeeze of his cock through his briefs, which is anything but) and drags him out the door.

Taemin loves the views but hates the bugs. When something buzzes past his ear he hits the ground with his arms shielding his head and Jongin laughs at him so hard he can’t breathe, he has to lean on a tree or he’s going to fall over, people are staring and he _doesn’t care_.

Taemin bumps him from time to time along the winding trail, smiling at nothing, and Jongin feels just as obvious. It’s not the sun heating his face when he remembers how Taemin, who is helping an elderly couple interpret their brochure as he jumps between his polished English and broken Japanese, such a sweet young man with his glossy black hair and his soft voice, with his many earrings left behind after Jongin accidentally pulled one out with his _teeth_ \- only Jongin knows how he looked riding him, leaning his palms back on Jongin’s thighs and rolling his hips, head tilted back to offer the long perfect arch of his neck. How Jongin's hand splayed delicately over his throat seemed to be the only thing holding him together, anchoring him to his body. How once he started saying Jongin’s name he couldn’t stop, one dreamy sigh after another, how he was still singing it into Jongin’s mouth when he came.

Taemin bounces back to him and he’s beaming. “They gave me candy,” he explains, delighted, and he and Jongin gnaw on the rubbery blue sharks as they hike.

It’s three hours up to the vista. The ocean is so blue he aches just to see it, so blue he tastes it like homesickness for a place he’s never been. Jongin is lightheaded with how insignificant and free he feels against all that vastness and Taemin - he laces their fingers together like he knows, like he came all this way just to stand in silence, like he can feel how Jongin’s insides are shifting together into something new.

 

 

 

“Why me?” Jongin asks. They’re each propped up against the wall in his bed, and the foot of space between them feels like a canyon. Taemin is watching the window, his profile only a sliver of moonlight, and Jongin gives up on an answer. He jumps in his skin when Taemin finally speaks.

“You looked the way I felt,” he says at last. “You had your ridiculous drink and your pretty face and you looked like you’d just realized you were always going to be alone.” He pauses, scrapes a hand over his face. “You should sleep."

“The last time you told me to sleep, you disappeared,” Jongin snaps back, but there’s no heat in it. When he dares to look again, Taemin’s eyes are closed, his breath shallow and even.

“I was surprised. You don’t have any pictures of your parents,” Taemin murmurs, just as Jongin is beginning to fade to black. It isn’t a question.

 _Spy_ , he reminds himself dryly. “Are you asking because you don’t know, or do you just want to hear me say it?”

“I have - assumptions,” Taemin admits. “I don’t know how you feel about them.” He bridges the gulf, fingertips tugging the hem of Jongin’s shirt. “Why did you tell them?”

“I was supposed to be getting married.” Jongin can see the flicker of Taemin’s eyes, silver like the edge of a nickel. “It wasn't some tragedy. She was a friend of mine. We had an understanding. And a few weeks before the wedding I just - couldn’t. I had been sitting on an offer to join the company here, and all I could think of was coming all this way just so I could lie to my parents over the phone about how happy I was.

“They weren’t angry, in the end. Just relieved that I wasn’t coming back. They can tell their friends about their successful son in America, and they never actually have to see me. They got what they wanted.” Jongin covers Taemin's hand with his own and keeps talking, a rush of honesty that burns up his throat.

“I wanted to hate you,” he says into the quiet, into the dark. “I think it would have been easier than gratitude. I was feeling sorry for myself, missing my friends, I was scared because it was too late to change my mind. But everything was different, because of you. For the first time, I was sure. I knew I’d done the right thing. You made me _different_ , and then you just - left. But you were there when I needed you, so how could I hate you? I spent one week with you, and even knowing you were lying to me the whole time it’s the happiest I’ve ever been.”

Taemin breathes in once through his teeth. Sharp, like a knife has found a home between his ribs. “I saw you in _Don Quixote_ ,” he says all at once, hand flying to his mouth. “And - others. I wanted to see you dance. I wanted - to see you.” His hand curls tighter under Jongin’s and he can feel the tremors. “I wanted to keep an eye on you. So this is my fault. Keeping tabs on you. Coming to the city. There’s a trail for anyone who goes _looking_. If you get hurt, it’s because I couldn’t leave you alone.” I never wanted you to leave me alone, Jongin thinks, desperate.

“Did you like it?” Taemin’s head turns toward him, baffled, and Jongin squeezes his hand. “ _Don Quixote_.”

“Jongin, I don’t think you know how to take care of yourself.” Taemin is leaning to face him and space between them vanishes a little more. “When someone says they’ve been stalking you for years, please be upset.”

“I feel so much safer knowing a deadly secret agent was watching my back,” he says seriously.

Taemin sputters out an undignified noise. “Most of what I do is behind a computer, don’t get the wrong idea.” When Jongin reaches out to drag a thumb over his lip, he shivers all the way to his toes. “You don’t even know me.”

Jongin has known a kind of madness. When he hurts himself but his blood is so hot he can't stop dancing. When he hangs outside the rule of gravity for the space of a heartbeat and he fears nothing. A little pain never seemed too steep a price to pay for perfection. Like the curve of Taemin's cheek in his palm, like his warm and pliant mouth and the wounded, needful sound Jongin kisses out of him. Death is only a word and fear only fiction, the way he feels with Taemin's heart beating under his hand.

“I think I do," Jongin says, and smiles.

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was written with "Door" and "The Eve" on an incessant loop, with a little help from "Work Song" by Hozier.
> 
> If you liked the story, please consider punching that little button for your neighborhood trash author. You have my love forever. And come yell with me any time on [twitter](https://twitter.com/hyb_jabbers/).


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